


A Family of Trees

by neurotrophicfactors



Series: In Another Life [3]
Category: Persona 3, Persona 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Junpei is a good friend, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 01:38:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12354741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neurotrophicfactors/pseuds/neurotrophicfactors
Summary: After several months of living together while Souji attends university, Minato finally needled him into telling his parents about their relationship. They’ve been talking about it for almost a year, but Souji kept finding reasons to put it off. Until now, that is.It didn’t go well.





	A Family of Trees

**Author's Note:**

> Don't really know what prompted me to write this but I just kind of gushed out the entire thing in one day. Today. So, uhhh, yeah. Same AU as always. The title is from Kids by MGMT.

Sitting next to him, Minato’s back is straight and his eyes are facing forward. His hands are folded neatly in his lap.

The train ride is silent. Minato is always quiet, but this quiet is different. Every Day Minato is quiet the same way winter is quiet: because he is gentle and his warmth lies beneath a blanket of insulating snow. Minato now is quiet like the standstill before a cataclysm—the break in seismic activity as the edges of the fault line find each other, moments before Armageddon.

They reach the station and Minato does not take his hand during the short walk back to the apartment they share with Junpei. Instead it curls in Souji’s pocket against the evening chill, and Souji has to remind himself to breathe, in and out like the rise and fall of the ocean waves. Minato unlocks the door, saying nothing, and removes his shoes in the entryway (a pair of dark brown loafers) before hanging up his jacket on the second hook from the left. Souji begins to remove his own outerwear mechanically before he stops halfway through slipping off his second shoe, freezing with one hand on the heel.

Minato steps into the living area to turn on the lights and Souji lowers his foot, standing up straight. Nausea and pain entwine in his gut and Souji thinks to himself, _please,_ _don’t let this be the start of another ulcer_.

Dry mouthed, Souji says, “Aren’t you going to say it?”

Minato pauses and turns to look at him with a carefully blank expression, lit from behind so that his features are cast in shadows. “Say what?”

“‘I told you so.’”

“Why would I say that?”

“Because you’re thinking it,” Souji says. “And why shouldn’t you? You were right from the very start. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? So go ahead.” He shrugs.

But Minato is frowning and shaking his head. “ _What I wanted?_ I wanted you to see the _truth_ , I didn’t want your parents to—” He cuts himself off, chewing on his damned lip like always.

After several months of living together while Souji attends university, Minato finally needled him into telling his parents about their relationship. They’ve been talking about it for almost a year, but Souji kept finding reasons to put it off. Until now, that is.

It didn’t go well.

“Well you got both, so congratulations.”

Minato freezes over, stormy eyes turning to black ice and his tongue becoming razor sharp. “If you’re that worried about what your parents think, I’m sure they’ll take you back if you grovel enough. They were pretty willing to believe that I seduced you in the night and turned you gay; they’re probably dumb enough to believe you can change your mind.”

“ _SHUT UP!_ ”

The silence that follows is deafening. Souji never shouts.

 _Minato was never the one who was carrying Armageddon_ , Souji thinks. The earthquake was inside of him all along.

“Stop making this about you,” Souji says, his voice low and trembling with the aftershocks. His hands are fists at his sides. “It never had to be you; I could have been dating any other guy and they would have reacted the same.”

Minato throws out his arms. “You made this about me first with your ‘ _I told you so_ ’ bullshit! What do you want from me?”

“I want you to _touch me!_ ” Souji cries. “I want you to get over your fucking guilt complex long enough to support me when I need you instead of closing yourself off like you always do!”

“What were you expecting?” Minato snaps. “Did you think they’d already know, like your uncle did, and everything would be okay? We _knew_ this would be a shit show. That’s why you wanted to wait until you weren’t living with them anymore.”

“That doesn’t make it hurt any less! Seeing the shit storm on the horizon doesn’t mean it’s going to cause any less damage!”

The kitchen window rattles in its frame as it’s hit by a particularly strong gust of wind from outside, the mid-autumn weather taking a bitter turn. Souji and Minato glare at each other across the dimly lit space between the entryway and the living room.

Minato rakes a frustrated hand through his hair, making his right eye visible for a moment before dark blue bangs fall back over it. He sighs heavily. “I _wanted_ to help you, but then we walked in the front door and you started getting pissy at me before I could even say a word!”

“Don’t say it like that, like I’m some kid throwing a tantrum! You hated my parents from the beginning. One misstep was all it took. You never gave them a chance and now you have the audacity to act upset when they rejected you too! You’re not as subtle as you think, Minato! People can tell when you hate them.”

“It wasn’t _one misstep_ , it was them making the same misstep, _consistently_ , all your life!”

“You might as well say that their mistake was having me in the first place!”

Minato narrows his eyes into furious slits and hisses, “ _Whatever_.”

Souji all but leaps aside as Minato storms into the entryway next to him, shoving his feet back into his loafers because they’re the easiest shoes to slip on. He jerks his jacket over his arms and tugs open the front door.

“Where are you going?” Souji asks.

“ _Out_.”

The door slams shut behind him with finality and then the only sounds left in the apartment are Souji’s laboured breaths and the steady ticking of the kitchen clock. His left shoe is still on his foot.

Souji kicks it off vehemently and trudges his way over to the couch where he drops onto a cushion, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. As the anger slowly leeches from his body, all that’s left is the cold. It was warm this afternoon, so they didn’t turn the heat on before they left to visit Souji’s parents.

Guilt trickles in like sick osmosis and Souji closes his eyes, trying and failing not to think about the look on his parents’ faces as he held his and Minato’s joined hands on the table in front of them. The worst part is that he _had_ known. He’d always known that it would go like this and he hated that it hurt so badly when the inevitable happened. That he’d gone in expecting pain and still been so utterly unprepared for it. And now he’s pushed Minato away, just like he always accuses him of doing.

 _You’re such a hypocrite_ , he thinks to himself.

After a long minute, Souji hears the sound of a door opening—from inside of the apartment—and he’s suddenly hit with a wave of mortification.

He opens his eyes as Junpei shuffles awkwardly into the living room, meeting his eyes and then glancing away. “Hey.”

Souji croaks, “How much of that did you hear?”

Junpei sits on the cushion farthest away from Souji, rubbing the back of his neck. “Uh, all of it.”

He closes his eyes with a long sigh. _Dammit_. “I didn’t realize you were home.”

“Chidori ended up having a project to work on, so I just made dinner for her and came home.”

After Junpei found out that Souji could cook, he all but begged him to teach him how. Minato had teased them at first, but when push came to shove, Junpei was a good student. He was eager to learn, and that was enough to overcome any annoyance Souji may have felt when he goofed off.

Sometimes Chidori doesn’t take care of herself, Junpei told him one afternoon, when things get really bad. And when those times come, he wants to be able to look after her. Souji suspects that Junpei wanted to learn for Minato’s sake as well. Minato is good at following recipes, but when he's in a spiral, he gets the same way. Now that Souji has joined the household, he does most of the cooking, but it warms him a little to see that Junpei still makes use of his new skills. As vitriolic as their friendship can be, it is easy to see why Junpei and Minato have stuck together all these years.

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out with your parents,” Junpei says.

A pang from Souji’s stomach. “Yeah... Minato was right: we knew it was coming.”

“You were _both_ right,” Junpei says firmly, “but you were also both assholes. You were putting words into his mouth and Minato was being… _Minato_.

“No parents are perfect, but some people really shouldn’t be parents.” Junpei is staring at the opposite wall with a hard set to his jaw. “They’re self-absorbed or maybe they just have too much going on in their lives to take care of someone else, and their kids are the ones who end up suffering for it. The lucky ones can shut off the part of themselves that seeks approval and hate them from a distance, but you’re not wired like that. Most of us just grow up wanting to be loved and getting lonelier and more desperate when we’re not—at least not in a way that feels like love.

“I think that part of Minato got severed when his parents died, or maybe he was just never able to form that sense of attachment again when he kept getting shuffled around his relatives like a hot potato.”

A vestigial organ: no longer in use, it ceases to function. Souji pulls his feet onto the couch and hugs his knees, breathing in and out slowly. He wonders how long Junpei has been thinking about this. They’ve never talked about their familial relationships, but he’s sure that Minato has ranted about his parents before and it isn’t difficult to deduce where Junpei is coming from when the only alcohol present in their apartment is for cooking and Minato doesn’t come home after drinking with his other friends.

Souji blinks against the stinging sensation in his eyes. “What do I do now?”

“Right now?” Junpei replies. “We give it half an hour and if Minato isn’t back by then, we look for his dumb ass. And after that? Well, you’re ours now. Whatever happens with your parents, we’ve got your back.”

Souji smiles at him softly. “You should go into counseling. I think you’d be great at it.”

Junpei laughs nervously, tugging down the brim of his cap while he flushes with embarrassment. “No way, dude. I’m just talking out of my ass.”

They end up turning on the television and watching an episode of anime together. It’s a seinen show with giant mechs that pretends to be more mature than its shonen counterparts, but Souji appreciates the levity nonetheless. It helps ease away more of the tension in his gut so that he no longer has to subconsciously count his breaths by the time the credits are rolling. Minato still isn’t home, so Souji puts back on his shoes and jacket while Junpei hovers in the doorway.

“Are you sure you don’t want my help looking for him?” he asks.

“Nah,” Souji tells him, “I know where he is.”

The wind has died down by the time Souji re-emerges into the night air, but the chill is still present. It’s difficult to tell with only the light of the streetlamps to judge by, but he thinks that the trees are a little more bare than they were this afternoon. High above the city, the night sky has been blotted out by a thick layer of clouds.

He doesn’t find Minato on top of the monkey bars as he expects when he ascends the stairway at Naganaki Shrine, but as he sets foot onto the pathway his eye is drawn by the glow of Minato’s MP3 player from where he’s sitting on the bench. The blue-green light catches on his pale skin and turns him ethereal, like a floating, disembodied head in the darkness.

Souji walks over and sits next to him wordlessly. Minato doesn’t look at him and Souji can very faintly hear the music playing over his headphones—not too loudly for Minato to hear him. He sighs and leans against the back of the bench, gathering his words.

Minato speaks first.

“I didn’t want to be right,” he says. “That’s part of the reason I kept pushing you to tell them. I _wanted_ them to prove me wrong. That’s why I was so angry.”

Souji swallows thickly, thinks, and licks his lips. “What about all that talk about ‘ _seeing the truth?_ ’”

“I concluded that they were assholes pretty fast.” _Understatement_. “I guess I thought that if you could see it too, it would hurt you less. Because you would know that it’s them and not you, and that you don’t have to please them.”

“I’m not like you,” Souji says. “I can’t just stop caring because I want to.”

“I know.” Minato still doesn’t look at him. There’s a long moment of silence and then he says, softer, “I’m sorry. I’ve been really selfish. Even now, I made you come out here to find me.”

Souji nods. He can’t say that it’s okay, because it isn’t, but he didn’t come out here to fight again. A breeze tangles between them and pushes Minato’s bangs the wrong way, making him wrinkle his nose as he raises his hand to fix them. It’s cute, but Souji doesn’t say so. That’s for another day with brighter spirits.

“I’m sorry too,” says Souji. “Even though I knew it would be bad, the reality of it hurt so much more than I imagined. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I decided how you felt before giving you the chance to even tell me, and that wasn’t fair.”

Minato exhales slowly and then he reaches out to cradle the back of Souji’s head, gently guiding it to his shoulder. “Don’t apologize for caring too much. I love that about you.”

Souji shuffles closer and shifts his hips to the edge of the seat so that he can rest his head against Minato comfortably, and then Minato curls his arm around his shoulders instead. “I’m not apologizing for caring. I was a jerk to you.”

“And then I was a jerk right back.”

“Yeah.”

For a while they don’t speak and Minato strokes his shoulder tenderly with his thumb. Then he whispers, “Maybe…” He pauses. “Maybe it was a mistake for them to have a child… but I’m glad they did.”

Souji nods numbly, blinking hard.

“I love you,” Minato tells him. “ _A lot_. And I can’t picture myself not loving you or wanting you.”

The dam breaks.

A sob punches its way out of Souji’s chest and he turns his face into Minato’s neck as the tears begin to slide down his cheeks, one after another in a continuous stream. Minato wraps both arms around his larger, trembling frame and presses kiss after kiss to his hair.

Minato murmurs, “ _It’s okay… We’ll be okay_ …”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
